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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

Adrienne Rich

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Adrienne Rich
Age: 82 †
Born: 1929
Born: May 16
Died: 2012
Died: March 27
Essayist
Feminist
Peace Activist
Poet
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Adrienne Cecile Rich
Adrienne Cécile Rich
Adrienne Riche
Make
Attempts
Liars
Lies
Usually
Ought
Lying
Everything
Simpler
Really
Liar

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.
Adrienne Rich
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
Adrienne Rich
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
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The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
Adrienne Rich
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Experience is always larger than language.
Adrienne Rich
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To see the light too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
Adrienne Rich
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
Adrienne Rich
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single I or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
Adrienne Rich
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Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Adrienne Rich
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
Adrienne Rich
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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich